A colorful and illuminating memoir of a cabaret performer.
Simon recounts his time at the fabled Moulin Rouge in Paris and how it led to his career in Hollywood in this debut book.
After a varied life in South Africa, England, and the United States as a gymnast, elite swimmer, and member of the South African Air Force, Simon was working as a water sports teacher at a resort on the Indian Ocean when he was given the opportunity to perform at the world- renowned Moulin Rouge. The 26-year-old Simon was amazed by the beautiful chaos of the cabaret, with its dancers, jugglers, acrobats, and animal acts. As one of the performers informed Simon on his first day: “The Moulin Rouge is where every show dancer wants to end up....Once you’ve danced here, you have a golden ticket to anywhere else in the world.” Simon quickly descended into the madness of the theater and the strange characters who made their livings there. Equally exotic was the city that surrounded them: Paris in 1988 was a place of great beauty and great grit, filled with tantalizing women, bacchanals, street thugs, and enterprising criminals. Simon had the opportunity to rise from a replacement background dancer to a principal performer, a position that would prepare him for the even more competitive world of Hollywood. All Simon needed to do was to focus and to keep out of trouble, but at the Moulin Rouge, that was easier said than done. With the help of co-writer Stephens, Simon has shaped his anecdotes from the time into a very readable and entertaining memoir. Flecked with quotes and references to the many writers who were captivated by Paris before Simon, the volume manages to communicate the surreal atmosphere of the city and the even more surreal environment of the cabaret. The author is perhaps a bit overly impressed with his own youthful self, making sure the reader knows just how capable and desirable he was, but for those interested in the esoteric world of the Moulin Rouge, this is a book worth reading.
A colorful and illuminating memoir of a cabaret performer.Pub Date: July 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-943848-92-8
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Waldorf Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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